


Dile al Búho Duolingo que Lo Siento

by XaviaAndromedovna



Series: University of the North, Swift Current campus [1]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canada, Alternate Universe - College/University, Background Grimmons, Bad Spanish, Bi Lopez 2.0, Depression, Donut's flammable lube makes an appearance, Español | Spanish, M/M, Misunderstandings, Protective Siblings, Romantic Fluff, RvB Rare Pair Week, Tutoring, implied past Docnut, past Lopez/Sheila
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2020-02-07 05:58:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18614539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/XaviaAndromedovna/pseuds/XaviaAndromedovna
Summary: Donut needs help studying for his Spanish exam and Dos is unlucky enough to be the TA.





	Dile al Búho Duolingo que Lo Siento

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for RvB Rare Pair Week, Donut's lines are intentionally bad Spanish, everyone else's lines are unintentionally bad Spanish, oh gods I really should have found a beta for this. Clearly I own nothing. In this world I see the Lopezes as being perfectly capable of speaking English, they're just extremely petty and too many people have told them to stop speaking Spanish so naturally they just do it more.

“No quiero estudiar más.”

“Yo lo sé,” Donut replies, slightly annoyed, “pero tenemos un examen mañana y no puedo failar”

Grif raises an eyebrow. “‘fallar’?”

“Ughhhh,” Donut moans as he drops his head onto the desk. “This is hopeless, all I know how to say is ‘can I go to the bathroom’ and ‘I don’t speak Spanish’.”

“You know,” Grif says from his bed on the bottom bunk, mouth full of Oreos, “you could just call someone whose job it is to help you with this stuff, like, I dunno, a tutor?”

Donut lets out a short laugh. “With what money?”

“Okay, fine, then the TA? He already gets paid to help you.”

Donut grimaces. “I don’t think he likes me very much.”

Grif rolls his eyes. “Can’t imagine why…”

Donut can, of course, because he accidentally told the TA, a sophomore who everyone just calls ‘Dos’ for some reason, that he wanted to fuck him when he was trying to say he wanted to dance with him. A very common mistake, probably.

“¿Qué hora es?” Donut recites aloud as he checks his phone. “Hmmm, well there _is_ still an hour left in his office hours, come with me?”

“Sorry, Donut, but I have a very busy schedule of not caring I need to follow.”

“You have to take the test too, you know!”

“Yeah, but _I_ already know how to speak Spanish, so I don’t need to study for it. It’s literally why I took this class.”

Donut shakes his head as he packs up his study materials. “I don’t know how they let you get away with that. Then again I guess it helps to have a boyfriend whose work study is in the Registrar’s office.”

“Will you stop that, he’s not my boyfriend.”

“Not yet,” Donut singsongs.

Grif sighs with exasperation. “This is why no one wants to live with you.”

Donut scoffs. “No, they just don’t appreciate good interior design.”

“Or you burning down their apartment building trying to seduce a pre-med.”

“That wasn’t my fault! Who makes FLAMMABLE lube?!”

“Donut!” A loud voice booms on the other side of their open doorway. The RA, a gruff junior in ROTC the dorm jokingly calls ‘Sarge’, is staring at them in disapproval. “How many times have I told you to stop yelling about lube!”

“Sorry, sir, I was just leaving.”

“And you!” Grif pauses with an Oreo halfway into his mouth. “If I see a single ant entering this room I’m writing you up!”

“Whatever.”

\\\\\

Dos’s ‘office hours’ are really just him hanging out in the lounge area of the multicultural centre, because there’s seating and no one really comes in there unless they know about it which makes it quiet. Usually.

“Uh, no, _Tucker_ , we can’t make a timeline because time is made of circles!” The large man in the blue t-shirt looks at Tucker like this information is obvious. “That’s why clocks are round.”

“Oh my godddd,” Tucker groans, “this is impossible.”

“Look, Caboose,” Church says to the blue-shirted man, “we have to come up with something today or we’re all gonna fail. If it makes you feel better, we can make it a time-curve, a fucking time-parabola, I don’t care. Can we just move on?”

Dos probably shouldn’t be listening in, because all of them are in the same physics class and he’s in a different group for this project, but it’s not like he can just turn his ears off. Even if he really, really wants to.

“Caboose is correct,” adds Sheila ( ~~his brother’s ex-girlfriend who he may or may not also have a crush on~~ ). “A linear model for the type of experiment we’re proposing would be misleading. Perhaps—”

“Admiral Buttercrust!” Dos turns his head rapidly to Caboose at this outburst, then looks to the doorway of the centre, where he sees… _mierda_.

“Oh heyyyy, Caboose!” Franklin Donut, wearing a bright-pink tank top with unseasonably large holes in the armscye, saunters into the space like he lives there, which he more or less does. As the heads of various ‘diverse’ student orgs on campus, all of whom are forced to share one cramped resource centre, Dos, Church, Tucker, and Donut see a lot of each other, too much if you ask Dos. He and Donut interact the least but, well, he said what he said.

“Donut,” Tucker whines in frustration, “please don’t distract him, we just got him to focus on the project.”

“Well hello to you too, Tucker!” Donut retorts.

Church sighs, “hey Donut, what’s up?”

Donut looks over at Dos. “Oh, I’m just here to see Dos, I have some huge holes in my knowledge and I’m hoping he can fill me in.”

Double- _mierda_.

“Shit,” Church gasps as he looks in Dos’s direction. “I completely forgot he was over there. You’re too quiet dude, it’s disturbing.”

“No soy muy callado, eres demasiado ruidoso.”

Church looks at Donut. “What’d he say?”

“Uhhh…” Donut bites his lip as he thinks. “‘I’m not very quiet, and you’re… rude and emaciated?’”

Dos laughs. “No, pero me encanta más.”

“Yeah, well, fuck you too,” Church grumbles. He and the rest of the ‘Blood Gulch Blues,’ as they’ve named their group, return to their project as Donut takes a seat across from Dos.

“That wasn’t very nice,” Donut chastises.

“No sabes lo que digo.”

“No, pero necesito aprender,” Donut responds, stilted but insistent.

Dos was hoping to get some of his own studying done, but he wasn’t getting very far anyway and Professor Ortez would probably murder him if he didn't, so he lets out a deep breath and puts his stuff on the table. “Bueno, ¿cómo puedo ayudarte?”

He answers a few of Donut’s grammatical questions then practices speaking with him. Donut calls him everything from a notebook to a tired grandma. About half an hour later, the Blues have finally left, so the only sound is Donut’s thick American accent. Suddenly the room goes quiet as Donut instantly stops talking when Dos’s brother walks in. His brother is a first-year grad student in the Robotics program, and usually doesn’t find himself on this side of campus. He certainly doesn’t come looking for Dos very often.

“Dime.”

“Debemos salir.”

“¿Por qué?”

“Porque tienes una cita con el médico,” he drones as if Dos is particularly annoying. Then again, that’s how he always sounds. “Cómo te dije esta mañana, y ayer”

“Sí, sí, recuerdo…”

Donut clears his throat and stands up a little too close. “¡Hola! Me llamo Franklin Donut.”

He side-eyes Donut then looks back at Dos like nothing happened. “Vámonos, estamos tardes.”

Dos packs up his things and looks at Donut with a conspiratorial grin. “Se llama La Pesado, por—“

“NO,” he says before pointedly taking Donut’s no-longer-outstretched hand. “Llámame López. Él es López Dos, soy el original.”

“Pendejo.”

“Tú empezaste.”

“¡Encantada!” Donut says with too much enthusiasm as he also picks up his things. “So that’s why they call you Dos! Well, as much as I’m loving being sandwiched between the Lopez brothers, I guess it’s time to end this three-way so you can get poked and prodded by the doctor. ¡Muchas gracias por todo, Dos!” And with that, he walks away.

“¿Él siempre—”

“Sí. Siempre.”

///

“Did you know Dos has a hot older brother who goes here?” Donut is halfway through his nightly skin-care routine while Grif and Simmons play some shoot-em-up game in front of the TV.

“Oh yeah, Lopez,” Simmons replies without looking away. “He was the TA for my Intro Robotics course. I thought he graduated.”

“Is he single?”

“God damn it,” Grif interrupts, “no, we’re not doing this, Donut, we are not getting roped into your boy drama again.”

“It’s just a question, jeez.”

“Well if you wanna know ask him yourself!”

“Fine! Maybe I will!” Well, he’s not quite sure when he’ll get the opportunity to do that or if he’ll ever even see him again, but that’s not the point. Donut walks down the hall into the boys’ bathroom, and as he’s washing his face he hears a heated conversation outside the door. When he turns off the water and puts his face in his towel, he registers that they’re arguing in Spanish. Which is a strange coincidence, but there’s no way—

“Claro que no puedes sí las cosas—”

“Dije que no quiero discutirlo.”

“Perdóname,” Donut says awkwardly as he passes through the brothers blocking the doorway with their dispute.

They both stop to look at him at the same time. “¿Donut?”

“H-hey guys, uhhhh sorry to interrupt, just needed to sneak past ya.”

“¿Vivas aquí?” asks Dos.

“Sí, ¿tú uhhh tam… también?”

Dos looks at Lopez like he’s just won an argument. “Sí. Mira, ¿quieres estudiar conmigo esta noche?”

“Uhhhhh…” Donut looks between the two silently glaring at each other with increasingly expressive eyebrows. He certainly could use the practice, but he’s not sure he wants to get in the middle of whatever feud this is.

“Bueno,” Lopez concedes before Donut can decide. “Me voy. Pero hablaremos mañana.”

“¡Adiós, López!” Donut calls to Lopez’s back. He doesn’t respond. “¿Todo bien?”

“Sí.” Dos leaves the door to his room open as he flops onto his bed.

“Uhhh, ¿eras serios o quieres que me voy?”

“No me importa. Entra.” Donut takes a tentative step into the room and sits on the bed opposite him. If he has a roommate, they’re not here often because this side of the room is even more bare than the sparsely decorated walls above Dos.

He can’t remember the word in Spanish but it seems important to check in on the guy. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Donut, si no quiero hablar con él, ciertamente no quiero hablar contigo de eso. Sin ofender.”

“Uhhh o-okay. Well if you change your mind let me know. Or if you just need a hug; I’m always willing to put a comforting arm around my fellow man!”

“Puta madre,” Dos mutters, sitting up to look at him. “NO. Habla en español o salí.”

“Disculpa.” Dos stares at him expectantly for an uncomfortably long time. “Soooooo… uhhh, ¿de qué debemos hablar?”

If his mistakes bother Dos he’s excellent at hiding it. In fact both of the Lopezes are remarkably stone-faced. They talk for another solid half an hour before Dos’s eyelids start drooping. “Well, I should probably get going.”

“Bueno,” Dos responds, already laying down again and not bothering to change out of his clothes. “Gracias, Donut.”

“What for? If anything I should be thanking you! Which I am, thanking you.”

He can see a hint of a smirk when Dos looks back at him. “De nada. Buenas noches.”

As he closes Dos’s door behind him, he can’t help but count it a win that he made such a notoriously expressionless boy smile.

\\\\\

Dos has not been having the best week. Besides grading all the exams (which is difficult when Professor Ortez demands he have them ready for the next session), he has La Pesado breathing down his neck making sure he’s taking his meds and not too isolated. He loves his brother, really he does, but their whole dynamic is that they more or less let each other do their own thing. This constant fussing is making him feel worse, not better.

He also may or may not be ~~obsessing over~~ thinking a lot about a certain innuendo-spouting brunette whom he finds super annoying. It was weird grading Donut’s exam because he could see the parts where even just the one tutoring session made a difference. Well that and his handwriting is disturbingly neat, almost like calligraphy. And he dots his i’s with hearts. And he managed to somehow slip a sexual innuendo into his exam; either he’s secretly a pornbot or he honestly doesn’t hear the way he sounds to other people.

But their tutoring sessions were about a week ago and they haven’t seen each other outside of class since. Not that he cares or anything. He doesn’t even like Donut.

That changes during Dos’s next Tuesday hours, when a sharply-dressed Donut waltzes into the multicultural centre. He’s still wearing his ‘signature colour’ but in a button-down tucked into gray pants with a gray and pink vest. Or whatever, Dos isn’t looking all that closely.

“Hey Dos!” he calls boisterously as he enters the previously silent space.

“Hola.”

“Gracias otra vez por todo tu ayuda. Creo que el examen fue más fácil con… uhhh… gosh darn it I practiced this…”

“De nada,” Dos replies with a smirk despite himself. “¿Por qué llevas este traje?”

“Why am I taking these eggs?”

“Ay dios mío,” Dos mutters. He indicates Donut’s outfit with a circular motion of his index finger.

“Ooohhh, you mean why am I all dressed up?”

“Sí.”

“Aww, thank you for asking! Well my moms are in town so I’m taking them out somewhere fancy. Besides, I’ll take any excuse to get a manicure!”

Dos decides to ignore that. “Entonces, ¿por qué estás aquí?”

“Oh! I brought you something as a thank you! Here.” Donut hands him an expertly wrapped box the size of his hand.

“Oh. Gracias.” He clearly expects him to open it now, so Dos tears open the wrapping and opens it to find a small eyeshadow palette.

“Recuerdo que cuando hablemos tú ha dije que quieres mantequilla y creo que este… ¿por qué ríes de me?”

Dos keeps laughing until he notices the hurt look starting to emerge on Donut’s face. “Disculpa. Eso es _maquillaje_ , _mantequilla_ es ‘butter’. Estaba hablando sobre mantequilla de maní, uhh ‘peanut butter’.”

“Ohhhhh! Well that explains why you were eating it.” Donut has joined in on the laughter, which does something funny to Dos’s insides that he doesn’t want to process right now. “Well I’ll just take that back then, sorry about that.”

Dos moves the eyeshadow out of reach. “No, es un regalo.”

Donut lets out another slightly nervous laugh. “Well if you’re sure.”

“Sí, seguro, muchas gracias Donut.”

“No problem, hey, if nothing else, I made you laugh.” They look at each other for another quiet moment or so before Dos snaps out of it.

“¿Quieres discutir otro cosa?”

“Oh! Yeah, umm, well, I mean I did okay on the test, but I was wondering if… I mean if it’s not too much trouble…” Dos raises an eyebrow. “Do you think we could study together again sometime? I know these are your office hours, but I wouldn’t want to take up too much of your time if other students need to talk to you. Or if you think it’d be too annoying!”

If this had been any other week, Dos would have flat-out refused unless Donut just kept showing up and forcing his hand. But maybe Donut’s not so bad after all. “OK. Podemos estudiar juntos.”

“Yes! Gracias!” Before Dos can react Donut is hugging him. “This is fantastic, I can’t wait to spend sweaty nights exercising our tongues together!”

Oh right, that’s why Dos didn’t like him. “Ya me arrepiento de esto.”

“You too, Dos!” Donut says as he heads out the door. “¡Buenas noches!”

 _Mierda_.

///

Donut and Dos’s practice sessions go from once a week to once a night rather quickly, but they don’t exactly notice. At first, they would simply drill what the class was learning that week, but they soon just started talking about their days, Dos speaking in Spanish and Donut speaking in, well, Spanglish. Dos doesn’t tend to talk much about his family life, however; Donut’s only ever heard him mention his brother, and even that a couple of times at most.

Tonight is one such time. They’ve been studying for finals and are taking a much-needed break. Dos is on his bed texting and muttering at his phone while Donut sits perpendicular on what is technically Cece’s bed. (He’s seen her exactly once, when she dropped by for five seconds to switch out some books. She said she sleeps at her boyfriend’s anyway so she doesn’t mind if he crashes there, which is sweet of her.) Eventually Dos tosses his phone on the floor and puts his hand over his eyes. “Hijo de puta.”

“¿Todo bien?”

Dos sits up and begins putting on his shoes. “Me voy a la casa de mi hermano. Él no cree que no estoy sólo.”

“Aww, that’s sweet of him, not wanting you to be alone.”

“Ha! Digas ‘sweet’, yo digo ‘controlado’. ¿Quieres venir conmigo?”

“Wait, seriously? You want me to come along?”

Dos doesn’t look at him, just shrugs faux-casually. “No me importa, si quieres, puedes.”

“Aww, Dos, I’d be honored. I think formally meeting the family is a great step forward for our relationship!”

“No lo hagas raro.”

‘The Caves’ is what most students call Zanzibar Apartments, because they’re right next to the entrance to the park where the town’s cave system is and, well, the rooms are rather cold and have few windows. It was made in the last century when cement was the hot new thing in architecture and, while somewhat of an eyesore, it’s super cheap and the landlords are very chill with students.

“Entra,” Lopez calls when Dos knocks on the door. They enter to the sound of some sitcom on the TV while on the couch sit Lopez and… oh no. “¿Por qué traes el bicho raro?”

“Porque tengo amigos de verdad y nos interrumpiste.” Dos indicates a chair broadly with his hand. “Siéntate.”

The man in the purple hoodie whose name Donut forgets (inexplicably considering how they met) smiles at him when he sits down. “Hey Donut!”

“Heyyyy… how are you?”

“I’m good! How’ve you been?”

“Pretty good,” he responds awkwardly. “I didn’t know you lived here.”

“Yeah! After you burnt down Iris, Lopez and I decided to get a place together here.” Dos looks at Donut in surprise while Lopez seems to be trying to decide whether he’s more angry about Donut’s existence on this plane or delighted at his current misery.

“And you’re not… mad about that?”

“No, of course not! These things happen!”

“Yo soy todavía,” Lopez interjects. “Sabía que había una razón que no te quiero.”

“¿Ese eras tú?”

Donut sighs. “Sí. I’m never gonna live that down, am I?”

“Nunca,” the Lopezes say in unison, Dos slightly more amused than Uno but both smiling.

The rest of the night goes fairly smoothly (minus one or two comedic translation hiccups), and by the time he’s feeling too tired to stay awake he’s pretty sure Lopez has warmed up to him ever so slightly. Dos offers to walk him home, so they say their goodbyes and step into the balmy April air.

“Gracias,” Dos says about a minute into their walk.

“Por supuesto,” Donut replies. “¿Pero, por qué me ha invitó?”

Dos looks like he’s debating not answering, but eventually decides on a quiet explanation. “Mi hermano siempre se preocupe de mi porque tengo depresión. Todos nosotros lo tengo, entonces después fuimos de casa, él asegura que esté bien, pero es _muy_ molesto. Quería probar que puedo cuidarme.”

“Oh,” Donut responds before adding a smile. “Glad I could help. Thank you for sharing that with me.”

Dos smiles at him and they continue on in companionable silence. A little part of him was hoping Dos brought him along for more than just a point he wanted to make to his brother, but he’s just glad he can call him a –

“Also,” Dos tosses out into the night, earning a shocked look from Donut. Except for the stray translation, he’s never heard Dos speak English of his own accord. “Umm… I was wondering if—”

“Dos, you don’t—”

“Lorenzo. My name is Lorenzo.”

“Oh!” Well that solves that mystery. _Lorenzo_ stops walking and looks into Donut’s eyes.

“I was _wondering_ if you would like to go out together sometime, after finals of course.”

Donut can’t help the grin slowly building in his face. He leans in and kisses Lorenzo on the cheek. Lorenzo may or may not be blushing. “Claro que sí.”

\\\\\

(Even though Professor Ortez had to grade his personally because it was a conflict of interest, Donut still did excellent on the final exam, mostly because his boyfriend refused to let him speak English until it was finished.)


End file.
